There are certain things that everyone knows about James Bond, regardless of if they are an avid follower of the spy’s cinematic adventures of not. 007 gets the girl, he kills the bad guy, and he saves the world. That’s the formula of every single Bond film ever made, right? Well, apparently not, as an interrogation into the plots of all 25 movies released starring the secret agent to date reveal that one of these things happens at a shockingly reduced rate than we realized.
As outlined by Redditor u/I_love_lucja_1738, there are actually only a few Bond movies in which the world truly is at stake and James can be legitimately said to have saved the planet by the moment the credits roll. The rest of the time, the evil schemes of his enemies are actually much smaller in scale, often perhaps affecting global economics or its political stability but definitely not putting the world itself under threat. Here’s a handy-dandy breakdown of the world-ending levels of each Bond movie:
One fan in the comments crunched the numbers and determined that, as based on the above analysis, only five Bond movies feature world-ending stakes.
Although, obviously, in some cases, it’s pretty subjective whether the villain’s plot would’ve threatened the planet at large if they had managed to succeed.
And No Time To Die really should count as a world-ender, given the extremely sci-fi-leaning nature of its plot.
Whether the final figure is quite as low as five, it’s clear that only around a fifth of all James Bond movies actually sport the kind of high-stakes that we associate with the franchise. He might’ve been around for 60 years now, but 007 still has a lot of catching up to do before he’s saved the planet as many times as Marvel’s Avengers.